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Trentmann, Frank and Carlsson-Hyslop, A. (2018) The evolution of energy
demand: politics, daily life and public housing, Britain 1920s-70s. Historical
Journal 61 (3), pp. 807-839. ISSN 0018-246X.
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T H E E V O L U T I O N O F E N E R G Y D E M A N D
I N B R I T A I N : P O L I T I C S , D A I L Y L I F E , A N D
P U B L I C H O U S I N G ,
s
–
s
*
F R A N K T R E N T M A N N Birkbeck College, University of London
A N D
A N N A C A R L S S O N - H Y S L O P DEMAND research centre, Lancaster University
A B S T R A C T. This article offers a fresh perspective on the evolution of energy consumption in Britain from thes to thes. The twentieth century witnessed a series of energy transitions–from wood and coal to gas, electricity, and oil–that have transformed modern lives. The literature has primarily followed supply, networks, and technologies. We need to know more about people and their homes in this story, because it was here where energy was used. The article investigates the forces that shaped domestic demand by focusing on working-class households in public housing. It examines the interaction between political frameworks, public housing infrastructures, and the chan-ging norms and practices of people’s daily lives. It connects social and political history with material culture and compares the different paths taken in London, Stocksbridge, and Stevenage in the pro-vision of gas, electricity, and heating. Evidence collected by local authorities is used to analyse the uptake, use, and resistance to changes in domestic infrastructures, such as gas-lit coke ovens and central heating. The case-studies make a more general pitch for a new historical study of energy that places people’s lifestyles, their ideas of comfort, and political attempts to change them more squarely at the centre of inquiry.
* For helpful comments, the authors would like to thank Ben Anderson, Simon Gunn, Lynda Nead, Peter Scott, Hiroki Shin, Elizabeth Shove, Paul Warde; the Electrical Worlds Conference in Paris; theEnergy@CambridgeStrategic Research Initiative; the energy group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and the anonymous reviewers. Research was generously sup-ported by the AHRC (AH/K/) and the EPSRC/ESRC (EP/K/).
Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet Street, London,WCEHXf.trentmann@bbk.ac.uk
anna.carlsson-hyslop@gmx.co.uk
The Historical Journal, pageof © Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://crea-tivecommons.org/licenses/by/./), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
doi:./SX
OnMarch, Mr Luford wrote to the chairman of his local council in Stocksbridge, a small industrial town at the outskirts of Sheffield in south Yorkshire. He had learnt that a power cable for the Spink Hall estate would pass his council house and asked for permission to have it wired. He also wanted to know whether a tenant who wired his home but later moved out would be compensated for his investment. A week later, the council met and resolved that tenants had permission to wire their houses as long as they pledged not to remove gas pipes and restored all gasfittings if they left.
Mr Luford’s questions were testing the meaning of tenants’ ‘freedom of choice’between gas and electricity, which had been the subject of national debate a few years earlier. Mr Luford’s home was one small piece in the bigger story of twentieth-century energy transitions. For Britain, the picture is clear at an aggregate level. The decline in the use of coal for domestic cooking and heating of space and water started in the interwar years and accel-erated in the s ands, while the consumption of gas (first town gas then natural gas) and electricity rose.We know surprisingly little, however, about the micro-changes in demand that made up this macro-development. Electric lighting was promoted as cleaner and safer than gas, and electric fires as admittedly more expensive but flexible sources of quick, smokeless heat. Gas providers, by contrast, disputed that the future would be electric, insisting that people preferred gas for cooking. Coal interests argued for the continued use of solid fuels, especially for heating. But what did end-users think and how did they actually use these fuels? The aim of this article is to illu-minate the interplay between households, urban infrastructures, and politics in the transformation of energy use between the First World War and thefirst oil crisis (), a period when a large part of the population saw their lives trans-formed by public housing. This historical case-study is part of a growing interest in the dynamics of demand. It asks what energy is used for, instead of treating it as a function of supply.
This article examines changing energy provision and use in public housing occupied mainly by working-class tenants in three cities: Stocksbridge (a small industrial town near Sheffield, dominated by the local steelworks which had a
Luford to Stocksbridge Urban District Council,Mar., Sheffield Archives and Local
Studies (SA), CA/, housing generally, Jan. –Dec. ; Housing–applications, tenants etc., minute books–, SA, CA/, p.,.
Jason Palmer and Ian Cooper,United Kingdom housing energy factfile(London,);
Roger Fouquet,Heat, power and light: revolutions in energy services(Cheltenham,); Leslie Hannah,Engineers, managers and politicians: thefirstfifteen years of nationalised electricity supply in Britain(London,); Leslie Hannah,Electricity before nationalisation: a study of the development of the electricity supply industry in Britain to(Basingstoke,); Ian Rutledge, Phil Wright, and Sheffield Energy & Resources Information Services,Coal companies worldwide: competition and performance indicators (Sheffield, ). For the earlier period, see Karl Ditt, Zweite Industrialisierung und Konsum: Energieversorgung, Haushaltstechnik und Massenkultur am Beispiel nordenglischer und westfälischer Städte–(Paderborn,).
‘DEMAND’centre:www.demand.ac.uk/.
F R A N K T R E N T M A N N A N D A N N A C A R L S S O N-
H Y S L O Pcoke and gas plant connected to it); Stevenage (thefirst of the‘New Towns’ planned after the Second World War); and London (with its large and growing number of public housing estates).
Supply-oriented technological approaches have tended to treat demand as the almost inexorable result of ambitious engineers and their political and busi-ness allies. As Thomas Hughes put it in his seminalNetworks of power, bigger tur-bines were‘supply in search of demand’.Hughes and scholars in this tradition have been aware that new capacities of supply did not immediately spawn new demand–hence the aggressive marketing of special tariffs and appliances. Even here, however, demand is assumed to be created by the supplier, not by the consumer. Since the s, it has been clear that household electricity use does not neatly follow trends in GDP.Viewing demand as a reaction to supply becomes problematic, once we recognize that household energy use arises primarily as a means to an end, such as heating, cooking, entertaining, or mobility. This recognition is critical for the current debate about energy tran-sitions and future demand. While the active role of users has become a recog-nized feature of consumption and science and technology studies, with the exception of Graeme Gooday’s work on how electricity was domesticated in the early years, it has yet to be properly integrated into histories of energy. The best recent history of energy is characteristically entitled Power to the people, with plenty of useful data and analysis of energy supply and efficiency gains in the twentieth century but very little about ‘the people’ themselves and where their demandforpower was coming from in thefirst place.
What is revealed if we look at how households actually engaged with local gov-ernment and utility providers? The politics of everyday life has emerged as a fresh site of historical inquiry in recent years. Taylor and Trentmann have
Already by, Greater London had,council dwellings. At that time,per cent
of residents in inner London were housed by their local authority: by, this had risen to per cent; Jerry White,London in the twentieth century: a city and its people(London,), pp.,
–.
Thomas Hughes,Networks of power: electrification in Western society,– (new edn,
London,), p..
E.g. see‘The physicist’s role in using energy efficiently’, inAIP Proceedings no.: energy sources, conservation and renewables(Washington, DC,), pp.–; Energy Saving Trust,
‘The rise of the machines: a review of energy using products in the home from thes to today’(London,).
Graeme Gooday, Domesticating electricity: technology, uncertainty and gender, –
(London,); Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch,How users matter: the co-construction of users and technology(London,). Cf. the growing attention to energy and users in anthropol-ogy and sociolanthropol-ogy: Sarah Strauss, Stephanie Rupp, and Thomas Love, eds.,Cultures of energy: power, practices, technologies (Walnut Creek, CA, ); European Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, Energy Efficiency and Behaviour Conference , www.eceee.org/ library/conference_proceedings/EE_and_Behaviour/.
Astrid Kander, Paolo Malanima, and Paul Warde,Power to the people: energy in Europe over the lastfive centuries(Oxford,). An exception is Bill Luckin,Questions of power: electricity and environment in inter-war Britain(Manchester,).
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shown how Victorians’changing attitudes to cleanliness and growing water use triggered new forms of consumer politics.Our article takes this discussion a step further, by extending it to energy and into the era of social democracy, when the state became a main provider of public housing. In a seminal article on the merit of consumer-focused analysis of technological diffusion, Ruth Schwartz Cowan noted that the market for home heating systems in America did not only consist of private consumers but also of government agen-cies responsible for public housing.In England and Wales, council homes’ share of the housing sector rose from per cent to per cent between
and.Public housing in this period acted as an increasingly import-ant conduit between public infrastructures and private demand. This spread ‘consumption by proxy’, with local governments building certain capacities for fuel use and appliances for their council tenants. Council houses came equipped not only with pipes and wiring but with particular types of heating and, into the s on many estates, with cookers installed. The importance of social services and transfers for income has been highlighted in recent pro-posals for alternative measures of well-being to that of GDP,but this has yet to leave its mark on studies of consumption. The energy nexus of public housing is an interesting case for exploring the links between public and private consumption in the creation of demand. While the examples in this article are English, its qualitative micro-level approach will, we hope, be of meth-odological interest for students of energy, everyday life, and consumption more generally.
This article follows the changing configuration of demand from the macro-political context, which framed the availability of different fuels, to the micro-level of households. In the s, the ‘freedom to choose’between gas and electricity was the result of a political settlement, reached by parliament. It set the framework for energy provision and use at the local level and forms the natural starting point of our inquiry. In a second section, we look at the reality of freedom of choice in the daily life of council tenants. We then
Vanessa Taylor and Frank Trentmann,‘Liquid politics: water and the politics of everyday
life in the modern city’,Past and Present,(), pp.–; Frank Trentmann,‘The pol-itics of everyday life’, in F. Trentmann, ed.,The Oxford handbook of the history of consumption
(Oxford,), ch..
Ruth Schwartz Cowan,‘The consumption junction: a proposal for research strategies in
the sociology of technology’, in Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds.,
The social construction of technological systems(Cambridge, MA,), p.. For the state, see Lizabeth Cohen, A consumers’ republic: the politics of mass consumption in postwar America
(New York, NY,), ch.; J. Logemann, ‘Is it in the interest of the consumer to pay taxes? Transatlantic differences in postwar approaches to public consumption’, Journal of Consumer Culture,(), pp.–; Frank Trentmann,Empire of things: how we became a world of consumers,fifteenth century to the twenty-first(London,), ch..
Mary E. H. Smith,Guide to housing(rd edn, London,).
Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi,‘Report by the commission on the
measurement of economic performance and social progress, www.Stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.Fr’, (), pp.–.
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H Y S L O Pexamine sources for traces of what households actually used energy for. This varied enormously, a fact obscured in the general picture of aggregate demand and supply. Finally, we reconnect private use to the public sphere by giving attention to tenants’voice and new forms of knowledge and governance.
I
Price continued to be a significant factor for energy consumption in the twen-tieth century but did not determine individuals’actual preferences. Price move-ments of fuels were dramatic in the interwar years. In, it was almost twenty times more expensive to heat and cook with electricity than with coal: by, it had dropped to four times. Gas had narrowed the gap with coal even earlier; cooking and heating with gas cost per cent more than coal in ; by
, it was merely per cent more expensive. Electricity would benefit further from low pricing during and after the Second World War. What mat-tered ultimately was not the diminishing price of electricity as such, but the cross-price effects of gas, its principal competitor. By the outbreak of the Second World War, three-quarters of British homes were wired. Electricity con-trolled lighting–but was also making inroads into cooking and heating. Some
·million electric cookers were in use compared tomillion gas cookers. One in four households had an electric fire. Other appliances were slower to arrive, especially when compared to the United States; as late as, fewer than one infive British households owned a fridge or a washing machine, com-pared to –per cent in the USA. English working-class families lived on tighter budgets. High eviction rates and tenant turnover on many council estates reflected that rents and travel costs were higher than in their previous homes.Working-class tenants mostly used the cheapest available fuel: coal (per cent of their fuel expenditure went on coal in, compared to per cent on gas andper cent on electricity).Many relied on coal clubs which eased budgeting by paying for coal on a weekly basis throughout the
Peter Scott and James Walker,‘Power to the people: working-class demand for household
power ins Britain’,Oxford Economic Papers,(), pp.–; Sue M. Bowden,‘The consumer durables revolution in England,–: a regional analysis’, Explorations in Economic History,(), pp.–; Sue Bowden and Avner Offer,‘The technological revo-lution that never was: gender, class, and the diffusion of household appliances in interwar England’, in Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough, eds.,The sex of things: gender and consumption in historical perspective(Berkeley, CA,), pp.–.
Hannah,Electricity before nationalisation; Anne Clendinning,Demons of domesticity: women and the English gas industry,–(Aldershot,); Political and Economic Planning PEP,
The market for household appliances(London,).
See e.g. Ruth Durant,Watling: a survey of social life on a new housing estate(London,);
Terence Young,Becontree and Dagenham: a report made for the Pilgrim Trust(London,).
Scott and Walker,‘Power to the people’.
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year. Prepayment meters made temporary non-payment possible and allowed tenants to switch to candles, oil lamps, or the coal range.
Cost was one reason for the slow diffusion of electric appliances; hire pur-chase restrictions were another. The work of servants and housewives was another and made labour-saving appliances appear less essential. As Bowden and Offer have shown, until the s, most British families preferred to spend discretionary income on furniture, clothes, and home entertainment, such as radio and television, rather than on labour-saving devices such as washers or fridges; although the vacuum cleaner was ubiquitous.
Fuel and light continued to make up a significant portion of the household budget across the twentieth century, especially for the poor. Rigorous compar-isons of their precise share across time are, however, complicated by a number of quantitative and qualitative limitations. The Ministry of Labour’s survey of
–working-class households, which underpins Scott and Walker’s import-ant article, reported on the cost of energy as share of householdexpenditure. Post-war surveys, by contrast, give figures by incomedistribution. Nor are the social groups surveyed identical. The –report focused on non-manual workers as well as manual wage-earners but excluded the long-term unemployed, lodgers, and workers earning more than £a year. Massey’s survey of the following year studied public sector employees with an income of over £. It is not possible to compare the changing fortunes of these two samples with the larger and more representative household surveys of and . In addition, the real price of electricity fell relatively for domestic users after the Second World War, partly because rising demand itself lowered costs, partly because domestic consumers were cross-subsidized by industrial ones–in domestic consumers paid the same nominal price they had in ( per cent less in real value), while nominal prices doubled for industrial consumers. British households paid disproportionately little during the costly peak hours, a time of day when their consumption expanded significantly in the mid-twentieth century thanks to the spread of electric heating; a differential day and night tariff was only introduced in
–.Just as important were changing norms of comfort–as expectations of indoor temperature, domestic habits, and the use of different parts of the home changed, so did the use of fuel. The same percentage of the household
Peter Scott and James Walker, ‘Working-class household consumption smoothing in
interwar Britain’, Journal of Economic History, (), pp.–; Madeline McKenna,
‘The development of suburban council housing estates in Liverpool between the wars’(D. Phil. thesis, Liverpool,).
Great Britain, Department of Trade and Industry, Committee on Consumer Credit,Report of the committee, chairman: Lord Crowther, etc.,, Cmnd.
Sue Bowden and Avner Offer,‘Household appliances and the use of time: the United
States and Britain since thes’,Economic History Review,(), pp.–.
D. P. Sayers,‘Electricity supply costs and tariffs’,Proceedings of the Institution of Electrical Engineers,(May), pp.–. Cf. Martin Chick,Electricity and energy policy in Britain, France and United States since(Cheltenham,).
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H Y S L O Pbudget devoted to heat might therefore have produced greater comfort. The following tables, then, need to be read with caution. Still, they are a reminder of the considerable amount of money that working-class and lower-middle-class households continued to devote to fuel and light, even during the affluent sixties, spending betweenper cent and per cent on energy (see
Table).
I I
The interwar years saw intense competition between gas and electricity. In some areas, councils and electricity suppliers tried to require new tenants to use elec-tricity for all their household needs. In others, the authorities favoured gas and sought to halt electrification by refusing to permit the laying of mains or prohi-biting the canvassing of potential customers on their estates. It was much more economical for public authorities to build housing that relied on one fuel rather than two. All-electric or all-gas installations (which in reality often meant coal plus either electric or gas) were promoted by their respective indus-tries, which often did not recognize the preferences orfinancial need of consu-mers for mixed fuel services. In older building stock, dual provision required costly retro-fitting. Offering one energy provider a monopoly, moreover, was a bargaining strategy leading to lower costs for the local authority and, by exten-sion, for local tax-payers and tenants. Conversely, it paid electricity providers to have an exclusive contract for an entire estate and offer favourable terms for wiring and connection, because electricity for cooking and heating promised to absorb a large part of the load otherwise left underutilized by electric lighting on its own.
Several councils in thes and earlys championed electricity. Electric wiring meant ceilings could be lower, and electricfires eliminated the need for additional flues. In Tilbury, Essex, the local council laid down in its tenancy agreement that since houses had been equipped with electricity for lighting, heating, and cooking, tenants were prohibited from using alternative fuels or appliances. Doing so was grounds for eviction. The council also tried to add
s a week to the rent for the electric cooker it had installed, regardless of whether a tenant wanted to use it. When the rent increase was rebuffed, the council sent a letter ordering tenants to‘take immediate steps to have the gas cooker removed’and to inform the council accordingly.Fulham (London) and Cardiff tried to make their tenants use electric lighting only.
Such restrictive terms were controversial. Two main forces converged: the special interest of the gas industry and the broader political assault on
Political and Economic Planning,‘Supply of electricity in Great Britain’(London,),
p..
House of Commons debates (HC Deb)Mayvol.c..
Francis Goodall, Burning to serve: selling gas in competitive markets(Ashbourne, ),
p..
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Table Weekly expenditure on fuel as a proportion of total expenditure, by income or total expenditure,–
–survey (expenditure)
–survey of public sector employees (income per head of family)
Expenditure band in
prices, £/week
Proportion of total expenditure
spent on fuel and light
Base size
Income band in prices, £/week
Proportion of total expenditure spent on fuel and light
Base size
Under ·% – ·%
– ·% – ·%
– ·% – ·%
– ·% and over ·%
– ·%
– ·% Average for all households:
– ·% ·% ,
– ·%
– ·%
– ·%
– ·%
and over ·%
Average for all households:
·% ,
F
RANK
TRE
N
T
M
A
N
N
A
N
D
A
NNA
CARL
SSO
N
-HY
SLO
P
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survey (household income) survey (household income) Income band in
prices, £/week
Proportion of total expend-iture spent on fuel and light
Base size
Income band in
prices, £/week
Proportion of total expend-iture spent on fuel and light
Base size
Under ·% Under ·%
– ·% – ·%
– ·% – ·%
– ·% – ·%
– ·% – ·%
– ·% – ·%
– ·% – ·%
– ·% – ·%
and over ·% – ·%
– ·%
Average for all households – ·%
·% , and over ·%
Average for all households
·% ,
Notes and sources:Expenditure and income have been converted toprices using RPI values from Gregory Clark,‘What were the British earnings and prices then? (new series)’; MeasuringWorth,,www.measuringworth.com/ukearncpi/;values have been used for the–and–surveys.
Ministry of Labour and National Service,Weekly expenditure of working-class households in the United Kingdom in–(London, ).
Philip Massey,‘The expenditure of,British middle-class households in–’,Journal of the Royal Statistical Society,,
(), pp.–.
Ministry of Labour,Family expenditure survey: report for–(London,).
Department of Employment,Family expenditure survey: report for(London,).
EV
OLUTIO
N
O
F
E
NERG
Y
D
E
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AND
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municipal socialism, as the Conservative tide turned against Labour-dominated councils that controlled public services of energy and transport. The Electricity Act ofweakened the power of local authorities over electrical supply in what became the National Grid. In the area of the London County Council (LCC), the Passenger Transport Act further took away the power of East Ham, Barking, and other local authorities to run their own trams. In , ‘freedom of choice’in fuel was enshrined in the Newport Corporation Bill. Efforts to expand the principle came both from the National Gas Council and the Ministry of Health. In, the Kettering Gas Company went to parlia-ment to stop Kettering Urban District Council from forcing electricity on its tenants. The private bill was successful and immediately sparked attempts to extend the clause to other areas. The following year, the London-based Gas Light and Coke Company–which served·million customers–pressed suc-cessfully for a similar clause that prevented the thirty-one local authorities in its area from restricting tenants’choice over lighting and heating.
In the House of Commons in, the Liberal National MP for Luton, Dr Burgin, referred tofifty-six cases in his constituency of tenants forced to light candles or use oil because they could not afford the electricity forced on them by their municipalities.Some MPs reported that local authorities had poured cement into gas pipes–or had cut through pipes while the meter was still running.It was now that legislation applied the principle of freedom of choice to all local authorities, preventing them from prohibiting or deterring any occupier from taking a supply of gas from an authorized supplier.
‘Freedom of choice’legislation has not gone completely unnoticed by histor-ians,but its significance for framing energy provision and use has yet to be appreciated. It was national politics that preserved a degree of flexibility about fuel type and appliances, reduced technological lock-in, and slowed elec-tricity’s advance. The LCC compromised accepting dual provision provided that gas and electricity undertakings paid for the necessary pipes, wires, and services without placing an additional charge on local taxes. Tenants were given the right to switch to their preferred fuel for cooking and heating, as long as they asked the council for permission, bought and installed their own cooker, and restored the home to its original state on moving out.
Newport Corporation Act,,&Geo., The National Archives (TNA), HLG/ , ch., col.(), p.. See also Will Thorne (Lab.) in HC DebMayvol.cc.
–; the exchange between Walter Womersley (Con.) and Arthur Greenwood (Lab.) HC Deb July vol. cc. –; Herman Finer, Municipal trading (London, ), pp. –; Stirling Everard, The history of the Gas Light and Coke Company, –
(London,), p..
HC DebJunevol.c..
HC DebMayvol.cc.; and HC DebMayvol.cc.–. Clendinning, Demons of domesticity, p.; Goodall,Burning to serve, p.; Hannah, Engineers, managers and politicians, p..
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H Y S L O PThere was nothing inevitable about this compromise between gas and elec-trical interests. It was a political settlement underpinned by ideas about citizen-ship, property rights, and the relative powers of public providers and private utilities. Parliamentary debate about ‘freedom of choice’came on the heels of the world recession and the political crisis that finished the second Labour government and gave rise to a Conservative-led national coalition. Amongst the victims of the crisis were independent Liberals and their most cherished policy: free trade between nations. However, as far as trade and com-petition at home was concerned, the post-alignment was an opportunity to block the creeping municipalization associated with Labour. In the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries, municipal bodies took over the bulk of utilities. Although in London, the private Gas Light and Coke Company and the South Metropolitan Gas Company dominated, in gas and electricity, public utilities outnumbered private companies by : in the early s. The debate over fuel in public housing connected a liberal defence of individ-ual freedom with anxieties about government control of natural monopolies. Frank Briant, one of the few independent Liberal MPs, told the House of Commons in ,‘[s]ome of my Socialist friends seem to want to make us live under conditions imposed by someone else who does not know our wants. I know my own wants.’Whether or not a person wanted a gasfire, was ‘purely a private matter’:‘an Englishman’s home is his castle [and] I strongly resent interference by a landlord, whether municipal or private, with a man’s judgement as to his own convenience and taste’.
Conservatives agreed. According to Herbert Williams, the Conservative MP for Croydon South, local authorities were abusing their power as landlords and coercing their tenants. To give council tenants a subsidy with one hand, but take away the ability to choose cheap fuel with the other, was also ‘illogical’, the Conservative MP Alfred Wise (Smethwick) said; mocking Labour’s enthusiasm for electricity, he stressed that he only used gas for cooking and had‘not yet progressed to the height of wealth or passion of clean-liness’of the socialist Labour MP for West Walthamstow, Valentine McEntee. Thefight between tenants and municipalities was another historic parliamen-tary battle between free Englishmen and tyranny. For Conservatives, the whole matter cast more general‘doubts on the wisdom of making municipal-ities landlords and giving them the control of big industrial undertakings’.
Scott and Walker,‘Power to the people’, p.; Hannah,Electricity before nationalisation,
p.; Robert Millward,Private and public enterprise in Europe: energy, telecommunications and trans-port,–(Cambridge,).
HC DebMar.vol.cc.–. HC DebJunevol.cc.–. HC DebMayvol.cc.–.
Edward Tempest Tunstall North, Conservative MP for Nuneaton,Times,Mar.,
pp.–; and HC DebMar.vol.cc.–.
Oswald Lewis (Colchester), HC DebMar.vol.cc.–.
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With more and more councils entering the housing market and running their own electrical utilities, there was a risk of monopoly and collusion. Protecting tenants’right to choose their fuel would help defend private utilities against the Leviathan of state enterprise.
Interestingly, Labourites invoked property rights to demand local authorities be‘masters in their own house’, just like private landlords.But these were minority views. When it came to provision within public services, consumer choice beat property rights. Even the two Labour MPs for West Ham who favoured nationalizing industry accepted that municipalization should not over-rule a tenant’s right to choose.
I I I
What was the effect of this political principle for tenants, for the infrastructures of their homes and for consumption? To have freedom of choice between a stable set of services was one thing. To have it in an environment where infra-structures, standards, and the services themselves were changing fast, another. Gas and electricity competedfirst over lighting, then over cooking, and by the mid-twentieth century over the biggest use of household energy: the heating of space and water. Solid fuels (coal or coke) had dominated here. Water heating was linked to space heating; coalfires and ranges heated water in kettles or in a back boiler that used some of the heating stove or cooking range’s output to heat water. In thes and s, new public housing with additional wiring and central heating transformed infrastructural provision and capital costs. Changes like these redefined freedom of choice for tenants, councils, and energy providers.
In reality,‘freedom of choice’did not result in the dual provision of all ser-vices but in a division of serser-vices between gas and electricity. Amendments to the bill threw out the requirement to install dual provision for gas and electric lighting. In London and other cities, tenants in new council housing had electric lighting from the outset. And ‘freedom of choice’ was not the same as the right to electric wiring. Public housing in Stocksbridge, for example, was almost exclusively dependent on gas until the Second World War.In London, equity between gas and electricity was regional rather than individual. The / split between gas and electric wash boilers that the LCC observed from into the late s meant that on some housing estates tenants did their laundry with gas wash boilers while on others they used electric ones. There was little choice from a tenant’s point of view. On new estates, however, kitchens did have both gas and electric points for a
HC DebMar.vol.cc.–.
HC DebMayvol.cc.–. The Plaistow MP was a former gas worker and
the LCC’s Beckton Gas Work was close to the Silvertown constituency.
Housing at the Royd,May, Stocksbridge Urban District Council minute book, SA,
CA/.
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H Y S L O Pcooker; a gas point was also provided for heating in the first bedroom. Tenants then had to hire appliances from authorized suppliers. In practice, then,‘freedom of choice’provided tenants with negative liberties rather than positive rights. They did not have a right to a particular fuel, but they were allowed to install particular appliances at their own expense. Choice depended on what infrastructures public housing came with in thefirst place. In council housing in s, London this included electric lighting. A tenant who wanted gas lighting could not be refused but had to obtain the council’s consent and meet ‘reasonable’ conditions, for example, adding a gasfitting on the wall if electric lighting had been installed in the ceiling.In a place like Stocksbridge, where only gas reached council housing at the time, such freedoms were meaningless. The council only began installing electric light in.Stevenage New Town, by contrast, offered its tenants the choice of gas or electric fuel for cooking from its foundation in.
The position was equally varied with regard to appliances. London and Stevenage provided their homes with fewer built-in appliances and left it to tenants to obtain a cooker and wash boiler of their choice from a separate sup-plier–mostly rented or by hire-purchase–whereas Stocksbridge directly installed cookers and wash boilers until the lates; after, all tenants except old age pensioners had to provide their own cooker, and existing cookers became the property of current tenants. After the war, the LCC intro-duced electric immersion heaters alongside coalfires in all houses andflats. This was less about giving tenants a chance to switch completely from one fuel to another than about enabling them to adjust their fuel mix seasonally, with coal automatically heating both space and water in winter and the option of using electricity to heat water only in summertime.
Making freedom of choice a reality could be expensive for tenants. In December, for example, Stevenage Corporation decided to install electric immersion heaters in new houses where tenants wanted these–at an additional
dof rent per week. The Gas Board objected that tenants had not been given a fair choice. The corporation stuck to its decision and installed electric immer-sion heaters in all houses that did not have solid fuel boilers. It did‘not consider that the gas heaters were economic to run’. However, a provision was made for the installation of gas water heaters over sinks,‘which would be provided if the
Rawlinson to deputy director of housing and deputy valuer,Jan.,‘Gas and
electri-city supplies for permanent housing’, London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), GLC/HG/ HHM//L, part, development & construction, heating & hot water services.
Report by valuer,May, LMA, GLC/HG/HHM//L, gas bills and various acts:
correspondence and reports.
In thes, however, the Electricity Board used freedom of choice to force Stocksbridge
council to install further power points and to offer new tenants the choice between gas or elec-tric cookers. Special Housing Committee,Mar., SA, CA/, Stocksbridge Urban District Council minute book–.
Memorandum on supplies to LCC block dwellings, Dec. , LMA, GLC/HG/
HHM//L, part, development & construction, heating & hot water services.
E V O L U T I O N O F E N E R G Y D E M A N D
tenant so wished’. The corporation agreed to pay the initial capital cost, but ultimately it would be‘recovered from the tenant by an addition to the rent’. When tenants exercised their right to choose gas or electric cookers and heaters, they also chose for the next generation of residents. On estates in London, ainvestigation revealed that council tenants hadfitted thousands offlue-less gas cookers, and had had,gas sink water heaters installed by the council. Such decisions could be costly. In Stocksbridge in , the council ruled that tenants who had installed electricity at their own cost would not be compensated when leaving and that new tenants would nonethe-less automatically be charged an additionalda week in rent, the same that the council charged when it put in electricity itself. Freedom of choice had become an excuse for raising the rent. By the early s, tenants were granted permission to remove the pantry and fit a refrigerator in its place, but had to agree to leave behind the refrigerator for the next tenant.Such additional charges and outlays mean that available budget surveys probably underestimate the true share of energy in the household budget.
In the early s, it had been the gas industry that had rallied behind ‘freedom of choice’. By the s, it was electricity boards. In , in Stocksbridge, for example, the local council was under pressure from central government to cut the costs of new housing. Initially, solid fuel central heating was used but this was shelved in Mayin favour of‘modern’New Marathon solid fuelfires. Subsequent plans to install these infifty houses on the Stubbin Farm estate, though, were cancelled to save costs. Electricity now was to be limited to light and a few plugs and the council opted for the cheapest available gas cookers and gas wash boilers. The Electricity Board argued that it could only electrify the houses for free if there were‘adequate facilities…to give all tenants a freedom of choice’ and ensure ‘a substantial use of electricity which would make their schemes fully economic by producing
rd meeting of the corporation, Nov., Hertfordshire Archives and Local
Studies (HALS) CNT/ST///, minute book . Gas and electric providers tried to outbid each other with special tariffs for councils; see, e.g., Crowther to Lee,Aug., SA, CA/, housing generally, Jan.–Dec.. For similar strategies in private suburbia, see Peter Scott,The making of the modern British home: the suburban semi and family life between the wars(Oxford,), pp.–.
Reply to question in council regarding the number offlue-less gas appliances in the
coun-cil’s dwellings,, LMA, GLC/HG/HHM//L, gas bills and various acts: correspond-ence and reports.
Council meeting,Mar., and Housing Committee,Nov., SA, CA/,
Stocksbridge Urban District Council minute book–.
Sept., SA, CA/, housing generally, Sept.–Dec.. Scott and Walker,‘Power to the people’.
Council meeting, Aug. , SA, CA/, Stocksbridge Urban District Council
minute book–.
New World Sgas cooker (£ sd) and thea Elton Gas Wash Boilers (£ sd).
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H Y S L O Prevenue adequate to cover the heavy capital costs’.It demanded a capital con-tribution charge of £per house, unless the nexthouses on the Stubbin Farm estate got an extra power point in the kitchen and tenants were asked what type of cooker they wanted. The council caved in, and took some of the gas cookers back into store. On one part of the Stubbin Farm estate, twelve tenants chose gas cookers, twenty-nine electric ones, and three brought their own.
As central heating advanced in the s and s, the principle of ‘freedom of choice’was increasingly invoked by competing suppliers jockeying for market share. In, the Local Authority Associations and the Electricity and Gas Boards agreed that the Boards would not charge capital contributions if tenants were given the freedom to choose the fuel for their main domestic use. Central heating made this formula all but meaningless, since the fuel picked for central heating by the developers and local authority was also the preferred fuel to heat water, whether tenants liked it or not.
Stevenage illustrates how rising standards and new energy systems that favoured one fuel triggered increased demands for provision of the other. The Parker Morris report () encouraged central heating, making higher standards of housing mandatory for new towns in and for all council housing two years later; dwellings had to have heating systems that kept the kitchen and circulation space at degrees Celsius, and living and dining spaces at degrees when the outside temperature dropped below - degree.This was achieved by installing various forms of central heating. In thes, most central heating in Stevenage New Town was by gas, although flats in Martins Wood had electric storage heaters. Initially, the Electricity Board was pressing for freedom of choice for cooking and an equal share of central heating. In , it successfully tested off-peak, electric warm-air heating systems in eleven houses in Trotts Hill. Stevenage Corporation, however, continued to favour gas, which its heating consultant considered cheaper and more advanced. Without an equal share of the heating market, the Electricity Board pressed the town to at least fit all houses with electric immersion water heaters. The Corporation had alreadyfitted some immersion heaters in the past and by ,, out of,dwellings had them. Still, the Board was not satisfied and indemanded £,in retrospective connection charges. Stevenage Corporation refused. A year later, in, the conflict wasfinally settled when the Gas Board agreed to pick up part of the con-nection charges for electricity, in exchange for controlling the heating market, a
Electricity Board circular ofOct.and letter ofJan., read at the Housing
Committee,Feb., SA/CA/, Stocksbridge Urban District Council minute book, May–May, and for the following point.
Housing Committee,Sept., SA, CA/, Stocksbridge Urban District Council
minute book–.
John Burnett,A social history of housing,–(London,).
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quid pro quo settlement repeated elsewhere in England.Freedom of choice for the tenant had transmuted into fair shares between suppliers.
Freedom of choice thus boosted demand from two directions. Thefirst origi-nated with tenants, who were allowed (at a cost) to install additional appliances. Some of this was about substitution, such as wanting a gas cooker instead of an electric one (or vice versa). In other cases, it brought altogether new appliances and, with it, higher levels of use. The tenants who demanded electric immersion heaters in s Stocksbridge fall into this category. The second came from energy providers themselves. Freedom of choice here legitimated competing suppliers’ encouragement of greater demand. As consumption of one fuel went up in one part of the home (such as the use of gas in central heating), pro-viders of the competitor fuel fought to secure new outlets for themselves. Choice was no longer just about meeting present demand but about building future demand into the fabric of the home with additional points, wiring, and appliances. Higher housing standards, such as the Parker Morris standard, gave this momentum an added push.
I V
So far, the discussion has focused on the infrastructural capacity of the home. Capacity matters, but it is not the same as demand. How did tenants actually use the equipment for heating, cooking, and lighting? The following section explores tensions arising from unforeseen practices and complaints about inad-equate provision.
Housing estates were planned with categories of imagined users in mind. In some cases, homes were divided into‘better’or‘normal’grades with different energy capacities. Councils also redesigned homes in anticipation of future life-styles. In London, the LCC ensured that larders could hold a refrigerator from as early as.In, Stevenage Corporation decided that kitchens would have a space for a refrigerator, even though working-class homes still relied on a larder. Some council members called forfittings for a radiator in the hallway, again to meet an anticipated rise in standards. In , Stocksbridge decided to increase ‘comfort’ in its post-war houses by installing central heating, although the policy was reversed in May, when a newly elected council cut the housing budget and brought back thefireplace.
Finance Committee,Feb., appendix A, minutes ofth meeting of the
corpor-ation,Dec., p., and general manager’s report, HALS, CNT/ST////, box, corporation agenda and reports July.
LCC,A survey of the post-war housing of the London County Council,–(London, ), p..
th corporation meeting, Planning Committee,Jan., HALS, CNT/ST///,
minute book.
A Labour member (Mr Rains) pushed for the change in policy, so this was not a clear-cut
party-political issue. Housing Committee,May , SA, CA/, Stocksbridge Urban District Council minute book–.
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H Y S L O PThe switch from one fuel to another sometimes had unintended knock-on effects on existing equipment. Where gas wash boilers could not be adapted to electric ones because they would have overloaded the circuits, for example, the LCC eventually asked the Gas Board to install salvaged convertible ones. The conversion to natural gas from the s posed particular pro-blems; natural gas burnt hotter than town gas, requiring burners to be adjusted or appliances replaced. In London in the earlys, the council discovered only after the introduction of natural gas that some gasfires could not be con-verted. Those with an insufficientflue had to be removed and replaced with electric fires, whether tenants liked it or not. The substitution prioritizd shared living spaces and many tenants thus lost heating in their bedrooms; the LCC made an exception for pensioners and the disabled. The Barking Consumer Advisory Council and tenants’associations responded with petitions and demands for rent reductions.
What the wires and pipes reaching in and out of the home eventually demanded in reality was the result of what tenants actually did. The gap between demand and capacity could cut both ways. Tenants overloaded circuits, sometimes requiring an entire building to be rewired. They were often fru-strated by the small number of electric sockets. The British story here parallels that on the continent and cautions us against imagining developers, energy pro-viders, and producers as always joining forces to manufacture demand.
Just as importantly, though, demand also sometimes fell below the level for which the home and supporting infrastructures had been designed, damaging the property. In Stevenage, per cent of council dwellings showed frost damage in February . This was partly the result of an unusually harsh winter, but it also reflected shifting work and social patterns that changed the use of the home in ways not anticipated by town planners, architects, and engi-neers. The rise in female employment, in particular, meant more homes were unoccupied and unheated for longer periods of the day.In multi-storey build-ings, heating inflats varied sharply, exacerbating problems with condensation. In London in, officers of the Greater London Council (GLC) estimated thatper cent of dwellings on the worst affected estates suffered from conden-sation. In Stevenage as in Stocksbridge, tenants were reluctant to raise the
Memorandum to the senior assistant director‘H’, conversion to natural gas,May,
LMA, GLC/HG/HHM//L.
Barking Consumer Advisory Council to chairman of the LCC,Mar., and director
of housing to Miss Marshall,Oct., LMA, GLC/HG/HHM//L, conversion to natural gas.
As late as,per cent offlats in Germany still had only one socket in the kitchen,
andper cent had none at all,Energiewirtschaftliche Tagesfragen,/(), pp.ff.
nd andrd corporation meeting,Feb. andMar., HALS, CNT/ST/// /, corporation agenda and reports Jan.and HALS, CNT/ST///, minute book
.
‘Condensation and mould growth on council estates’, Housing Committee,Jan.,
LMA, GLC/HGH/HM//A, heating, part. In, Mass-Observation found that
E V O L U T I O N O F E N E R G Y D E M A N D
heat in order to reduce it.At the same time, inhabitants often used intermit-tent, rapid-response heating systems (e.g. gas warm air as opposed to continu-ous coal fires) while new building materials reduced ventilation and the capacity to store heat. Many engineers and housing managers blamed the con-densation in post-war housing on changing lifestyles, such as the rise in showering.
Tenants were at times troublesome users who put considerable strain on infrastructures and local authorities. In addition to overloading circuits, some blocked up the hot air grill in the sitting room.Others took plugs and the cooker with them when moving out. Housing inspection reports in Stocksbridge in–give a snapshot of the state some dwellings were left in. In Lilac Avenue, the tenants had taken with them three plugs and the ceiling light in the living room. Other homes were left in ‘grim’conditions with broken plugs or without a gas and electric meter.
These were forms of transgression or‘exit’, but tenants also exercised their ‘voice’. The use of fuel was intimately linked to expectations of comfort, and new infrastructures changed people’s sense of what was fair and ‘normal’. Energy adds an interesting dimension to our understanding of consumer polit-ics and casts the period between the rent agitation of thes/s and the privatization of council housing in thes in a new light. Tenants did not sud-denly become more demanding in the era of post-war affluence. Tenants raised their voice in the interwar years, encouraged by promises of ‘homes fit for heroes’ and the marketing of gas and electricity. There was also a growing awareness that standards were rising in public housing and higher than in private accommodation. In London, tenants’ associations were already asking the LCC to extend electric lighting in.A decade later, a dozen tenants on the Shay estate in Stocksbridge complained about the ‘vast
complaints about damp were disproportionally high in older housing stock: Mass-Observation,
An enquiry into people’s homes(London,), pp.–.
Planning Committee,July, HALS, CNT/ST///, minute book; Housing
Committee,Apr., SA, CA/, Stocksbridge Urban District Council minute book
–.
S. I. Benson,‘Condensation in housing: management consideration’,Housing: The Journal of the Institute of Housing Managers,,(), pp.–; J. B. Dick,‘Condensation in perspec-tive’,Building Services Engineer,(), pp.–.
P. H. W. Parish to Stevenage Development Corporation,Jan., HALS, CNT/ST// /AP/N, neighbourhood no.Pin Green, vol., Apr.–Mar..
Housing inspection reports,–, SA, CA/.
David Englander,Landlord and tenant in urban Britain,–(Oxford,); Peter
Shapely,The politics of housing: power, consumers and urban culture(Manchester,). As late as
,per cent of privately rented housing had no internal WC andper cent also lacked hot and cold water at three points, compared toper cent andper cent respectively in council housing.
William Parish (London County Council Tenants’Association) to director of housing,
Nov., LMA, GLC/HG/HHM//L. In Tooting, there was considerable interest in having electric lighting among tenants living to the east of Franciscan Road (the west side
F R A N K T R E N T M A N N A N D A N N A C A R L S S O N-
H Y S L O Pdifference in the conveniences of houses on the estate’. Why should they have to pay the same rent as neighbours who had a range in the kitchen as well as the front room, while they had to make do with‘the low type of Grate with oven that you have to kneel to attend to, and you can only get one pan on [the]fire’?In
, the tenants of Wilson Road in Deepcar and parts of Shay House in neigh-bouring Stocksbridge complained about a rent increase, pointing to houses on the Spink Hall estate that enjoyed superior amenities of electric light and ‘decent fire ranges’ but paid lower rents. Tenants thus came to demand higher standards already before the Parker Morris Committee drew up new official benchmarks in.
In the long run, tenants’voice and official standards were mutually reinfor-cing. Poor construction and flawed design translated into long-term costs, with tenants understandably concerned about added responsibility for mainten-ance, repairs, and redecoration. Damp and condensation were a growing source of complaint. In Stevenage, residents complained about damp and fungus almost from the moment they moved into council homes in the new town in the earlys. The corporation put air bricks in affected walls and treated spots with fungicide and emulsion paint. Residents were asked to help by washing their walls. As all involved acknowledged, damp and mould were not limited to Stevenage:‘[t]he problem is nation wide’.
It is not possible to disentangle the precise role played by changes in the built environment and changes in cultural sensitivity. Surveyors did not specify degrees of damp and mould or the levels of moisture, but tenants were certainly becoming more vocal about it. In Stocksbridge, they complained that damp exa-cerbated their rheumatism, caused fungus to grow, and spoiled paint and furni-ture. In January , a young woman wrote to the council describing conditions in her parents’bungalow. Their bedroom
is damp in Summer as well as in Winter, it has a Gasfire built in the wall which is most inadequate and very expensive, if thisfire is on forhours it doesn’t bring the tem-perature of the room up to more thandegrees F [degrees Celsius]. I have known times when the damp has rested on top of the blankets like dew.
She wanted her parents to get a regular coal fire. The surveyor found ‘no obvious defect such as leaking roof, defective walls, or lack of surface concrete’ and blamed the ‘coldness’ that resulted on the‘remote position from [the]
already had it), but also concern about higher rents; Tooting Tenants’Association to director of housing, LCC,Dec..
E. Hall, E. Baddeley et al., letter to Stocksbridge District Council, submitted to monthly
council meeting,June, SA, CA/, housing generally.
Petition, Wilson Road,Jan., and Shay House Petition (n.d.), council response by
acting clerk,Jan., SA, CA/, housing generally, Jan.–Dec..
Tripartite meeting between the Stevenage Development Corporation, the Urban District
Council, and the Residents’Federation,July, quoted at p., HALS, CNT/ST/// T/, box, vol..
E V O L U T I O N O F E N E R G Y D E M A N D
mainfireplace, the length of external wall, and the position of the house’. He agreed that an‘ordinaryfire is more desirable than a gasfire under these cir-cumstances’. In this case, the lay-out of the house was a main culprit. In other cases, surveyors pointed their finger at tenants. In Stevenage in , for example, the investigating chief estate officer acknowledged some construc-tional defects on Archer Road but stressed how many tenants on those blocks aggravated the situation by keeping their windows firmly shut when leaving for work, blocking off the larder vents or using paraffin heaters–a gallon of paraffin, he noted, produced a gallon of water vapour.
Expectations of warmth were changing, too. In , Mass-Observation found that one in eight residents on newer housing developments spontan-eously complained about being cold. In oral histories conducted in–
by the DEMAND research group, tenants in Stocksbridge recalled how into the s and s clothes were routinely warmed in the oven, coats were worn indoors (‘woolly heat’) and mothers would iron the bed before sending their children to sleep or slip in a hot brick in a pillowcase. The arrival of central heating was often recalled as miraculous. As one woman (b. ) remembered the change that reached her young family in the mid-s:‘The council were very very good, they, you’d have to pay a little bit more rent but the council actually installed the central heating…Just not dreading the winter. Not dreading it at all.’ The revolution in comfort, however, should not be exaggerated. In many cases, the warm air was pumped through slots in the ceiling, leaving people with cold feet.
Rising standards of warmth were winning out, but at a social cost.‘We were more together when we had thefire’, a mother (b.) recalled life before the mid-s.The mainfire brought family members together in front of the radio and television. Central heating dispersed them into their own comfy rooms or the kitchen. It did not, however, kick-start this centrifugal process singlehandedly. Already during and immediately after the Second World War, British households had purchased millions of portable electrical and gas heaters trying to beat coal shortages.These opened up new zones
Miss C. Morton to Stocksbridge council chairman,Jan., and Douglas E. Robinson
to councillor H. Bradbury,Jan., SA, CA/, housing generally, Jan.–Dec.; it is unclear whether the council granted the request.
Chief estate officer report ‘Dampness in dwellings’, contract –Pin Green East
Housing–Fairlands,Feb., HALS, CNT/ST///, departmental.
Mass-Observation,An enquiry into people’s homes, p..
‘Oral histories of homes and daily lives in Stocksbridge and Stevenage’, interviews
con-ducted by Nicola Spurling and Lenneke Kuijer (DEMAND centre) in–, UK Data Service,,http://reshare.ukdataservice.ac.uk/, see esp. interviews SB, SB, see also STVand STV;‘woolly heat’, quoted from STV.
‘Oral histories of homes’, STV, interviewed onNov.. ‘Oral histories of homes’, interview STV.
Leslie T. Wilkins,Social survey: domestic utilization of heating appliances and expenditures on fuels in/(London,).
